A little while ago, Mapleview Mall (where Michelle works) started a new Christmas poster campaign. Just yesterday, I noticed that one of the key words on this poster was spelled incorrectly.

In short, the poster reads “Christmas momento”. The second word isn’t one that appears in the English language. In proper English, it should be “Christmas memento”. It’s spelled with an “e” not with an “o”.

I’ve since verified this by looking it up in a dictionary.

What’s intriguing, however, is that when I asked various people at our local drinking spot, Pepperwood, almost everybody thought that it was spelled with an “o”. We met up with some friends of ours from our condo, Walt and Janice. Walt supported my claim, while Janice was convinced that it should be spelled with an “o”. (This conversation all happened before I actually looked in our dictionary and got proof that the “e” spelling is correct.) How it could become so popular to think that the erroneous spelling is in fact correct I find to be a little unusual. Is it, perhaps, that people don’t often use this word and that the “o” version just resonates in the mind more? But, for anybody who has used the word (such as myself), it’s the other way around.

With respect to the poster itself, I can only wonder what happened. Surely it would have been run through a spell check first,and that should have caught the problem. (But apparently it may not have been.) Or, perhaps it was just a mistake on the part of the printer, and the people who approved the final version fell into the “wrong thinking” about the word, so didn’t notice anything wrong with it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed a typo in something public – most often, it’s things like menus that get things wrong. But it is the first time I’ve spotted something like this that so obviously should not be wrong (while I suppose it’s an easy mistake, that doesn’t excuse the kind of proper verification that should have gone into it as a matter of routine) in such a high visibility public campaign.

Update: I’ve done more research and can clarify things some more. First, a Google search on: ‘memento momento “correct spelling”‘ quickly turns up more than enough references to support that the correct spelling is with an “e”.

But, from a UCLA course, “Linguistics 1”, here’s an explanation for why “momento” might have passed a spell check:

• “Please do not confuse ‘momento’ and ‘memento’. A momento is a unit of time (Spanish: ‘uno momento’). A memento is a souvenir, a memory.”

You can check the misspelling of “momento” online at SpellCheck.net, type it into Word and have it show you that it’s wrong, or simply look it up in a dictionary yourself.